This is a bit of a nerdy question, but I’m curious if your country requires that parliamentary constituencies have to be equal in population and if they ever redraws legislative boundaries also called constituencies to reflect changes in population, particularly for the lower house of parliament? Also, who’s in charge or drawing the new boundaries? In the US each state decides and it’s a mess due to huge amounts of gerrymandering.
In the US the constitution requires that every ten years the number of representatives is reapportioned to give states that have gained enough to merit it more representatives and states that have lost too much population lose Representatives. We also redraw the districts within states at this time. Due to a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s House of Representatives, state legislature, and city council districts must be drawn to be as equal in population as possible.
I got the sense from the UK that neither of these is the case and that it’s at the discretion of parliament to decide when and how to redraw boundaries and they can just keep them the same for as long as they want no matter how outdated the demographics are.
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Yes in Germany they have to be similar in population.
Districts for federal elections have on average around 250,000 inhabitants and should not deviate by more than 15 % from the average. If they deviate by more than 25 %, the borders have to be redrawn.
There are minor changes in almost every new election.
There is an independent commission that makes a proposal which lawmakers then have to approve. As far as I know this has never been politically controversial in the past and has always been approved without much debate.
They do. For the UK parliament there are four or five “protected constituencies” which are fixed regardless of their populations due to cultural and geographical reasons, the remaining constituencies are supposed to be around the same population plus or minus five percent. Periodically the government review this, add/remove the total number of constituencies, change boundaries etc, in fact there’s actually a review on the go just now.
I there’s a broadly similar system for the Scottish Parliament, with three Protected Constituencies (the Scottish seats in the UK parliament and the Scottish Parliament seats don’t quite match up).
No.
Here, the borders of each parliamentary constituency (we call them electoral circles) are always the same, and follow the borders of our districts (equivalent to what in the US would be states).
The number of representatives elected by each circle changes in order to reflect the population of the district which that circle represents. So districts with more people have more reps, and districts with less people have less reps.
Recently, this system has been the subject of various discussions and proposals for alternatives for complex reasons, related with vote power, strategic voting, representativeness in parliament and the role of the representative. Two alternatives emerged as the most consensual: a) getting rid of electoral circles altogether and b) creating a compensation circle.
Nope. I feel like this is only relevant in countries that don’t have proportional representation anyway. Which we do have. All votes for whatever is being voted for at that time are thrown onto a heap, divided by the number of available seats, and allocated to parties according to who received multiples of that number. So local boundaries only matter for local elections. Municipal boundaries for municipal elections, provincial boundaries for provincial elections, etc. Water boards have their own rules and their boundaries will frequently cross provincial lines and sometimes even municipal lines, though there’s also a couple that just exactly follow provincial boundaries. Edit: the only case where this may be relevant is for the Eerste Kamer/Senate, which isn’t elected directly but is elected by the members of the provincial government. But that’s also weighted by the number of residents in a province, plus extra votes for people living in Bonaire/Saba/Sint Eustatius and people living abroad (new this year).
The location of these borders isn’t really up for debate nowadays, they are where they are because that’s where they’ve been for ages. That’s not to say that the borders don’t change of course. But that’s more due to municipal changes than anything else. Sometimes two or more municipalities merge so a border simply disappears, sometimes one even just gets divided amongst neighbouring ones. Provincial border changes are rarer since these mergers usually happen among municipalities in the same province. But there was a case a few years ago for example where two municipalities in one provincies merged with a third in a different province and the new municipality falls under the latter. These mergers are all decided by municipal councils.
The Federal parliament has two chambers that are designed just like the US Congress. The upper chamber has 2 seats per full state (there are six half-states); the lower chamber used to be variable with one seat per 20k inhabitants, but it is now fixed to 200 members. The proportions which canton sends how many reps there is calculated and ajusted anew for every legislature period.
The cantons *are* the legislative districts, and they always stay the same, except in very rare cases where some municipalities switch canton for cultural/political reasons.
We have party-list proportional representation in all cantons except those that are so small that they only send one MP into the lower chamber.
Parliamentary constituencies for the Congress of Deputies are fixed to be the provinces by the constitution. In Spain the system of representation is proportional so the number of representatives from each constituency is proportional to its population.
In the Senate every province has 4 representatives with some exceptions (3 for the islands of Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Mallorca; 1 for the islands of Eivissa-Formentera, Menorca, Fuerteventura, Gomera, Hierro, Lanzarote and La Palma; and 1 for the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla).
In the case of Catalonia, the Catalan Parliament has the power to make its own electoral legislation, so the constituencies could be changed from what they are right now (the same as the Spanish General Election ones because we don’t have our own electoral law).
The “local” constituencies are redrawn between each election if there is a need as they’re all between 1000-2000 people within one. The Election Authority draws these, no gerrymandering or political interference whatsoever, the regional constituencies borders are not redrawn as they follow the regional borders. They do however get a shifting number of representatives based on population of course.
In the end, it doesnt really matter that much at all because the election is proportional, there are 39 equalization seats and 310 regular seats so the result is proportional all the time. UNLESS one regional party manages to only get 12% within one regional constituency and thus gets one seat in parliament. But that has never happened so?
In Ukraine we had many experimentation with electoral systems, in 2021 parliament voted to go to fully proportional representation ( in nutshell : party got 10% of votes nationwide – it has 10% seats).
In our last election we have mix of this and fptp – 50% of seats were proportional, 50% – from constituencies.
Constituencies must be simmilar in size with some variations. They are drown by central electoral committee – independent body that is responsible for organizing elections.
Though must be noted, having multiparty system where ruling party was created 5 month before last elections, we just didn’t have issues with jerymandaring 🙂